Aqueduct: Spina could benefit from a wet track

OZONE PARK, N.Y. – The last week of racing on the main track is the biggest week of racing at the fall meet, though you’d never know it from the looks of Wednesday’s card, where maiden races comprise the first four legs of the pick six and the feature is an optional claimer for fillies and mares that carries first-level allowance conditions.

The six-furlong feature is a closely matched confrontation between Spina and Full of Gut, a pair of hard-knockers who are drawn in the two inside posts and in for the optional $25,000 claim price.

A rainy forecast may favor Spina, who has won three straight on fast, sloppy, and muddy tracks. She was just reclaimed by Chris Englehart, for whom she won 3 of 4 starts during the spring and summer.

Despite a propensity to drift out, Full of Gut fashioned a four-race winning streak through the heart of the season, including back-to-back scores in July off a claim by current trainer Richard Dutrow Jr., the fall meet’s runaway leader after a five-win weekend that included Redeemed in the Discovery Handicap.

Full of Gut’s streak was snapped last out, however, when she was all but eased in the slop off an absence of almost two months, and it has been another two months since then. Her Beyer Figures from four starts on wet tracks pale in comparison to her best form when it’s dry.

Celebrity Sighting, a first-off-the-claim winner for Rudy Rodriguez last out, has never been worse than second from eight career starts, with four of her five second-place finishes against rivals that immediately won again.

Hillsboro Bay, who suffered her first loss when she was third behind Celebrity Sighting in the mud, completes a short list of contenders.